Lawrence Lessig recently posted
a summary on the fsfe-uk list about problems that were
blocking Theora adoption. Here's a rebuttal, for what it's
worth.

His first point, that Theora isn't technically
competitive with the lastest batch of encoders for the
encumbered MPEG codecs, is entirely true. From Xiph's point
of view is that that's a little like saying there's no point
in using Linux because it doesn't work as well as Windows,
but the technical disparity does need to be addressed.

Monty and Derf have been working on a new encoder the past
few months, but there's nothing to show yet. We believe the
Theora format has scope to offer similar compression
efficiency to h.263 with less complexity. Beyond that, we
look to the BBC's Dirac. But in the
absence of software to prove the capabilities of the format,
one has to take our word, as well as being interested in
long term planning, for that to be a meaningful argument.

His second point, about people believing Theora is patented
is just FUD as far as I know. We're not aware of any
patents. The original developer of the VP3 format which
became theora grants
rights to any patents they might have on the
implementation. Submarine patents are of course always
possible, but they affect MPEG and Microsoft codecs just as
much as independent designs.

I've heard this argument from two different directions.
First from corporations who have already bet on one of the
MPEG codecs and want to dissuade any competition, and second
from Free Software people, who don't understand how patents
work, shrug, say it's all equally bad, and then get behind
the proprietary technology.

What happened with the html5 flame fest was that some
corporations said they didn't feel the current demand for
web content in royalty-free formats justified the additional
exposure implementing them would create. That's true so far
as it goes, but a very specific statement about their own
interests and hardly a reason for anyone else to eschew
royalty free formats.

There was a lot of talk at the recent
FOMS meeting about how
to address the FUD issue and educate the free community
about patents. Hopefully some public documentation
will come of it. It's been quite difficult to find legal
counsel who understands the FLOSS development model well
enough to toss ALL the traditional wisdom about patent risk
out the window: namely to never do or say anything at all.

All that said, I completely agree with the recommendation
that we get people talking. It can only help. Free software
can't compete with the installed base of flash video at this
point, but we should all be working to offer an alternative
for those who can use it, and prepare the toolchain so we
can provide the greatest support for software and creative
freedom in the next round of web video.

It's a strange article though. It's misleading to say "no
new MPEG-4 licenses are available" when talking about
codecs, when the reference is that the
systems patent suite is currently unavailable
during negotiations. MPEG-4 visual and AVC suites are still
available under the normal terms.

And then there's a long, verbatim quote from one of the
XviD developers. I'm always interested to hear the attitudes
behind such projects expressed clearly, and in this case the
thinking seems to be that software patents are evil, he
doesn't know anything about them, so everyone should ignore
the issue completely because everything potentially
infringes. Wow.

There's a huge difference between vague assertions that
Linux in general must be infringing hundreds of (unnamed)
Microsoft patents, and a very specific list of patents
considered by their holders to be required to implement a
specific specification. Pretending we can't make
distinctions here is just FUD.

I complained about this to a colleague and he said,
"Well, it's not a rah-rah theora article, if that's what you
wanted." But actually it is. After describing the patent
issue as unimportant, it then goes on to say how theora is
"good enough" using mp3 as an example. But
the codec that's most analogous to mp3 is h.264, not Theora.
They are both patented. They both feel like "good quality"
at file sizes that are convenient for use. And there is a
huge push on to standardize on h.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC) as a
standard codec for from hardware vendors, software vendors
and the file-sharing community. If software patents don't
matter, and h.264 is technically superior, why does the
article recommend theora at all?

The article does acknowledge that software patents can't
be ignored is some other jurisdictions (the Xvid developer
lives in Germany) and I actually agree that's the reason to
use theora over h.264. But it's a big reason, one that isn't
going away. And while the mp3 patents start expiring in the
next five years, h.264 will be encumbered for a long time to
come.

The last section is spot on though. Free formats will
succeed by having excellent support in all tools, not by
being free. We need to improve the reference implementation,
and improve tool support if we want to get somewhere.

The CBC Radio weekly science show has
for many years
provided Ogg Vorbis files on their archive page. It's been
great to see them doing the right thing with respect to free
formats, and being able to listen to this excellent show
when we when we weren't living somewhere where we could get
CBC over the air.

But, since the invention of podcasting, clicking through
a few webpages to download the media files has become
inconvenient, and while they are providing a podcast feed
for mp3 versions of their show, they're not doing it for
the Ogg version.

So I made
one. A little cron script looks up the current show's
index page and builds an rss feed with enclosures for all
the .ogg links. It's very basic, without proper titles, or
descriptions for the segments, but it's enough to get them
downloading in rhythmbox and iTunes.